Re: Alinea filling (hanlding of explicit line-breaks)

From:

Stefan Monnier

Subject:

Re: Alinea filling (hanlding of explicit line-breaks)

Date:

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 13:16:52 -0500

User-agent:

Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.0.50 (gnu/linux)

> The proposal is to add, in addition to paragraph separator, an alinea
> separator. Accordingly there would be a forward-alinea function similar
> to forward-paragraph.
I'm not completely sure I understand the details, so let me try to
describe what I think you're suggesting: you're suggesting to
distinguish the notion of paragraph (as used by the paragraph-forward
movement command) from the notion of "unit of text to fill"m which you
call alinea. And you also propose to complete this by adding
a corresponding forward-alinea command.
Is that right?
If that's the case, then I think we already have most of it in Emacs-24,
in the form of the fill-forward-paragraph-function, which decouples the
navigation command from the "unit of text to fill". You can see it in
action in ChangeLog files, where M-q will only refill the current
"alinea" starting with a function or variable name whereas M-} will jump
over the text of the whole file (which is made of several alineas, each
describe one (or sometimes a set of) variables or functions).
Stefan